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...a blog by Richard Flowers

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Day 4735: If the Economy Is Getting Stronger Why Are the Queues at Food Banks Getting Longer?

Wednesday:

The latest figures show that unemployment has fallen to 7.4%, the lowest since 2009 (i.e. now lower than Labour left behind), and an email from Mr Danny Alexander arrives to celebrate that there are now thirty million people in work.

We need to cast some light on this debate; we need some understanding of what’s driving this increase.

At the moment it’s all too easy for the Left to cry “Evil Tory Government” as though that was all the explanation necessary (and for some of them, all too often, it is); while the Right respond with “poor people have made poor decisions”.

(In fairness to Gove, he actually said “…so we need to help them”; that is, he meant to be patronising, not dismissive.)

The Tory responses in the debate – essentially to blame it all on Labour – won’t wash. Worse, they’re a cowardly approach, denying that the Coalition has changed anything.

Or rather, they’ll believe a statistic that says the use of food banks has trebled, but not ones that say the economy is growing.

And with inflation still running ahead of wages it’s easy to see why: a lot of people still have to live with their pay frozen – yes, including MPs’, despite what you’ve heard; IPSA’s recommendation still only being a recommendation so far, but massively unhelpfully adding to the prevalent (and probably untrue) “them and us” narrative. By spreading the pain so broadly we’ve avoided the horror of huge spikes of unemployment that the recessions of the Eighties saw – unlike the Thatcher governments, the Coalition hasn’t “written anyone off” – but at the expense of a whole lot more people feeling the impact of 2008’s economic disaster.

This is why Labour get traction from their “cost of living crisis” rhetoric. It’s a cunning way of turning the Coalition’s “we’re all in it together” into “we’re all hurting” (particularly when tossing in the odd sly reference to the “1%” who somehow aren’t in it together), while stealthily dropping that “Plan B” that they’ve been banging on about since 2010. (And how has borrowing more and super-taxing the rich worked out for France, by the way, Mr Balls?) What it doesn’t disguise is that Labour still only have one policy and that it won’t work. (Hence Ed’s… er… difficult time responding to the Autumn Statement.)

Hysterical commentary from Labour supporters, cherry-picking this food bank statistic and saying “we haven’t had food parcels since the Second World War so things are worse than they have been since the Second World War” simply is not credible in light of the overall picture. We can’t compare the use of food banks now to how they were used in the recessions of the Eighties (or Seventies) because they simply didn’t exist then. In fact, as an extra-governmental route for the “haves” to help the “have-nots” they’re a perfect example of Mr Balloon’s “Big Society” (though the Conservatories have dropped that as quietly as Labour dropped Plan B).

But we cannot in conscience ignore this evidence either.

It’s no good denying that some of the decisions of the Coalition government have caused genuine hardship, either directly by cutting people’s benefits (through the benefit cap, through the second room bedroom tax, through continuing to employ the evil of ATOS) or indirectly by the increase in decisions to freeze or stop payments (decisions often later overturned).

Actually, Mr Iain Drunken-Swerve’s DWP (the Department of Workhouses and Prayer, a ministry well known for their accurate use of statistics) does deny that decisions to freeze or stop payments have led to more people using food banks. Which comes back to begging the question: what does?

The most urgent question has to be are more people in poverty?

(Let’s not mess about with terms like Food Poverty and Fuel Poverty as though people have a meaningful choice between the two; if you’ve not got enough to meet your basic needs you’re screwed one way or the other so what’s the difference.)

There are a number of fairly hefty policies in place that are supposed to stop this: Labour’s minimum wage and tax credits; the Coalition’s triple lock on pensions; Liberal Democrats also managed to strong-arm the Chancellor into indexing benefits in line with inflation through the difficult years when it was highest.

So are these failing? If so which, and how, and how do we stop them failing?

How much of this increase in food bank use genuinely reflects an increase in poverty? Is it possible that there are other factors? I can think of a couple of alternative, not to “explain away” the rise, but to try to think about there being more to the picture.

The most obvious would be people who were previously choosing “eat” over “heat” now have another option: instead of deciding that they must have food and then shivering under a duvet, they can now pay for the heating bill and go to the food bank and get some emergency supplies. What has happened is that an “invisible” poverty has become a visible one.

Another is what you might call the “NHS” effect. If help wasn’t there, people wouldn’t use it. Since its inception, NHS use has grown almost exponentially even as the nation has become fitter and healthier. Similarly, as more food banks are introduced, and more people become aware of food banks, so more food banks are used by more people.

It’s possible that that interpretation is even supported by the authors of that “use of food banks has trebled” statistic: the Trussell Trust, a food bank provider – in fact they describe themselves as “a Christian charity that partners with local communities to provide practical, non-judgemental help to people in crisis”. (Although that’s not an interpretation they would put on it as they’re not as non-judgemental about the Government, whom they blame for the “scandal” of their own success.)

Their accounts (available on the Charity Commission website) say that they’ve demonstrated that their franchise model is “scalable and sustainable”, which suggests that they’re not so much answering an acute need as having found a necessary niche.

I’m not saying it’s wrong; it looks a bit weird but it’s probably just a coincidence when the October story compares April to September 2013 with April to September 2012, while the May story is comparing April to March 2012 with April to March 2011. As they say: they helped as many people in six months this year as they did in their whole 2012/13 year. I’m not surprised they have to help more people in Winter when the choice between heat and eat becomes acute.)

Stories about the increase in the use of food banks serve as publicity for food banks; so the Trussell Trust’s press release is not just impartially informing us of the situation, it’s also advertising their product. (Indeed, Tesco, for example, are now encouraging people to donate a shop – at Tesco of course – to the food bank, so turning them into advertising for Tesco!)

You could also say that if people in need are discouraged by shame from looking for “hand outs”, hearing that many more people are using the food bank reduces that disincentive, in a way “permitting” the people who need the food to go and claim it.

Let me emphasise though that just because I can hypothesise alternate explanations for some of the rise in food bank take-up, that doesn’t mean that they’re right. That’s why we need to be asking questions.

I don’t want to rain on the economic parade, but Labour and Labour supporters have latched onto this as “A Big Thing”, and I can’t say that they’re wrong to do so. I know that it’s a big cause for concern, for me and many other Liberal Democrats. We’re concerned for the human tragedy, obviously, but also because it seems to fly in the face of statistics that say the economy is getting both stronger and fairer.

Policy ought to be evidence-based (and unlike Labour I won’t just grab a statistic and say “so there!”), and we need to understand what this piece of evidence is telling us, so these are questions for which we need an answer.

4 comments:

I agree with the dilemma - the increase in foodbanks is certainly down to a mix of genuine increase in need, more foodbanks existing and people who were previously invisibly poor now having another option. There doesn't seem to be any solid evidence as to the split between these three.

The Trussell Trust has for several years been quite aggressive in its expansion, lobbying Government for money well before 2010, so it doesn't sit well for them to claim that the expansion is purely down to increased need.

One analogy is shelters for battered wives. If a charity opened lots more shelters for abused women, it's likely that women currently suffering in silence would come and use them. Would we all cite this as evidence of an explosion in domestic violence? No, not least because there's good evidence (Crime Survey of England and Wales) to oppose that interpretation.

I suspect a lot of people would rather be "written off" by this Government than suffer its continuing attentions in the form of work capability assessments, forced unpaid work experience and the like.

I'm also surprised and disappointed at the implication that the Trussell Trust are exaggerating the need for their own purposes. It trivialises a very real problem. It's unworthy of this blog, which usually has a very clear moral compass.

"I suspect a lot of people would rather be "written off" by this Government"

Unfortunately the alternative is the Labour Party who *invented* ATOS and the like.

"I'm also surprised and disappointed..."

I'm sorry that you think that, Liz, but if anyone is trivializing the issue it's the people drawing simplistic cause/effect connections between the increase in food bank use and the Coalition. And, yes, that includes the Trussell Trust.

They are hardly impartial in this. They're the largest provider of food banks and their trustees are known to be supporters of the Labour Party. They're the ones who chose to issue a press release calling it a scandal. That's hyperbolic and not justified by their lack of analysis.

It the Tax Payer's Alliance issue a Press Release saying that 50% taxpayers are overtaxed I'll take a go at their logic; I don't see why the Trussell Trust should get a free pass just because they're notionally "nice".

I want to see people helped out of poverty, not used as political capital. Not even by a charity.

Liz, I think MM's point about people not being written off was about the Coalition Government aiming and succeeding in keeping unemployment lower rather than as in the '80s the Tories calculating that a boom for most meant trashing a smaller number wouldn't matter.

And it's a bit of a nasty, glib shot to say people would rather be "written off" than assessed: obviously not, or why go through the assessments? I'm currently waiting for the results of my latest ATOS assessment and am very worried about it, but given the alternative of being "written off" I went along with it, thank you very much. I hate and distrust ATOS and wish they'd been one of the things the Coalition had changed from the Labour Government, but I had ATOS assessments in the same place, in the same way, under Labour.

Your final point seems to prove the point of the article: I'm "also surprised and disappointed" that asking evidence-based questions of both the government and any other organisation with its own agenda is smeared with lacking a "moral compass". It's unworthy of you to trivialise an attempt to examine the truth, which it is not immoral to question unless you believe only in 'revealed truth' from the government, one particular charity or any other higher power. I'm a Liberal, and I prefer to ask questions of any of them and hold them to account, thank you very much, rather than surrendering my own moral compass to what somebody else tells me.